Working From Home

2/19/2008 11:03 AM EST

I commute 70 miles to an office where I work as a software engineer. My company has offered for me to work at home, and I have an office at home where I could work. However, I prefer to commute to be a part of the work environment and maintain my presence as team player. We have a developer that works remotely and he always remains the outsider. There is a stigma, I regret to admit, upon workers-at-home that I'd rather avoid and that is that they are less dedicated and less engaged. Final decision factor for me is that I am not terribly self-disciplined and working at home affords me to much freedom.

It may be that "factories concentrated capital into buildings where workers had to go", but there is capital in knowledge workers working together and being able to personally interact when necessary.

2/19/2008 9:29 PM EST

I agree with blooy, the problem is that there are not many people self-disciplined to work from home.

2/20/2008 3:47 AM EST

I have a 40-minute train ride plus some biking to work. I can work on the train, but going to the office does cause a lot of friction each day. I try to work from home a few days per week, which works wonderfully. Fewer distractions and much easier to focus on writing or other work that requires long stretches of focus.

It also makes it much less stressful to walk down to daycare and pick up the kid. I think that if you have more than 30 minutes to your your work, you really should try to work from home a lot. Wasting time, increasing stress, and producing carbon dioxide emissions moving around every day is simply not worth it.

The idea of being an outsider in the office is an issue, but my experience is that once you are established in a company or group, that can be maintained by a presence of a couple of days per week.

2/20/2008 5:01 PM EST

I started telecommuting when I moved out of Silicon Valley 3.5 years ago. At the time, I suspected that the arrangement would be problematic, and that I would be gradually phased out, due to being out of sight and thus out of mind. However, telecommuting has actually worked remarkably well. With a 1 Mbps connection, I can use Linux servers across the country nearly as well as when I was on the same LAN. Through frequent teleconferences, I've been kept in the loop. Not only have I saved the commute time, but also I can do constructive work during tedious meetings. Though there are a few difficulties, my net productivity has increased through telecommuting.

2/20/2008 8:41 PM EST

You can get your work done remotely but you cannot play on the team. I spent 5 years telecommuting as a technical trade journalist but to move up in the organization, I had to move 2000 miles to the home office. Web cams and conference phones just do not substitute for physical presence. There's more to the job than simply working.

2/21/2008 6:11 AM EST

In software engineering and no doubt many other disciplines, a quiet undisturbed working environment allows you to 'get in teh zone' as Joel Splolsky would have it and be far more productive. This is far easier to achieve if you can electronically lock out interruptions.

In practice most teleworkers are found to 'over compensate' for the possible accusation that they may be goofing off at home.

It is useful and even essential at times to have face-to-face contact and direct teamworking, but not all the time, and often that is a barrier to true productivity.

I once worked with a guy who only came in to the office on mondays. It was one long meeting, but also a sociall interaction; the rest of the week everyone got down to work. He was amongst the most popular members of the team. It works when people choose to enable it and make it work. It does however change the way you work, but generally that way is more organised and structured with better time managment.

The biggest problem IMO is having a suitable workspace in the home to dedicate to that purpose. One solution is remote office space.

2/25/2008 10:04 AM EST

I agree with the two comments about how you really need to be in the office to advance in your career. There's just no replacement for the "hey, can I run this by you" type of meetings that home employees generally aren't part of.

2/25/2008 11:09 AM EST

Reader comment:

Mr. Ganssle,

I should admit up-front that I work for a defense contractor in a security clearance environment, so working from home isn't much of an option currently. Though there might be some advantages to making my home-office a restricted area (e.g., my kids would no longer be able to borrow my pencils or scotch tape and not return them), I don't think it would really be worth the time and expense. Having said that, I don't think the security problems are the real issue.

In my (not so) humble opinion, the biggest obstacle to working from home is management - the average manager does not trust his or her employees to actually work, and has no way to determine whether they are actually working eight hours a day. What do I mean by that?

I have never worked for a company that paid me based on what I produced. I have always been paid based on how many hours I spent in their building. That is, I don't get paid based on whether a particular work product has been completed within some pre-determined time period, I am paid based on the fact that I spend forty hours a week in the building. Some of those hours are productive, some not so much; I get paid the same regardless.

Why is that? You would think an employer would be more interested in what and how much I produce. But I have worked at only one company that made any effort whatsoever to measure productivity, and that was SLOC. (I'll leave the validity of SLOC as a productivity measure to another discussion.) If my manager has no way of measuring my production, how does he know whether I am working at home or just sitting at home in my underwear reading Dilbert? And yes, I once had a manager who would admit that he would not allow his employees to work at home because he did not trust all of them to actually work.

I don't see work-at-home engineering making much progress until management learns how to measure productivity in a meaningful way.

And for the record, I drive 25 miles each way. I spend about an hour and forty minutes on the road each day. That doesn't bother me as much as I thought it would. I have become a podcasting fanatic and am probably better informed now than I was when I drove less. (Any chance The Embedded Pulse or The Embedded Muse will ever become an audio podcast?) I bought a Honda Civic Hybrid when I started this job, which keeps my gas bill down to about four gallons a week. If the car lasts ten years, it should work out to somewhere between $4000 and $5000 a year. The irony is that driving less wouldn't save me a lot of money, as the fixed costs (the car and insurance) are so much larger than the marginal costs (gas and maintenance).

Having said that, I would love to work at home. I just don't see it happening unless I change employers. And move out of the defense contracting industry.

Thanks for the thought-provoking essay.


William Carroll
The Embedded Avenger
embedded.avenger@verizon.net

2/27/2008 5:53 AM EST

Driving your car to work is the holy cow in many industrial societies. And the price of gas - even at 2 USD per Liter(!) here in Europe - does only make up 20..40% of car ownership costs. Recently the German government tried to stop tax relief for commuters in order to limit polution and congestion, but since they incited families to build new homes in the previous 20+ years, many took the money and moved out into the countryside, only to clock impressive mileage in order to have a career.
But even for those of us who are not overly keen on the career side of life, working EFFICIENTLY at home with family members present is almost impossible unless you take the shed in the garden or have your home office very well isolated from family life.
Depending on companies, may be mixed schemes are the solution, where some days are spent in the office - but without fixed desk .. which brings us to another holy cow issue.